


Scales

by Jessa



Series: HM Server Prompt Fills [2]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst, Human!Alec, M/M, Mention of blood, Mild Sexual Content, Prompt Fill, mer!Jace, mer!Magnus, minor references to mild violence and suggestions of coercion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:01:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25355170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jessa/pseuds/Jessa
Summary: It’s mer kink. Magnus/Alec to Magnus/Jace and back again. The endgame is probably Malace.
Relationships: Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood, Magnus Bane/Jace Wayland
Series: HM Server Prompt Fills [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1850245
Comments: 10
Kudos: 23
Collections: Hunter's Moon 500 Prompts





	Scales

**Author's Note:**

> Lost faith, woke up. re-posted. Written in response to the July 17th prompt ‘scales’.
> 
> Thanks for checking this out. I hope you enjoy it <3
> 
> [A finnbenlo version of this now also exists here ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25355689)  
> because this is one of those stories where I realised later that this is totally them as well.

Magnus wakes. Jace’s arms are always warm. Even here, beneath the dead reef. Others don’t dare to drift into the cove so Jace and Magnus take each other here to teach each other things. Jace teaches the ways of the merfolk. Magnus teaches the ways of the men he left behind.

Jace stirs but doesn’t wake. Merfolk sleep deeply after pleasure, Magnus is learning. As deeply as one man he’s remembering now.

Gently, Magnus frees himself. Leaving Jace in their bleached coral cave. Its mouth invisible to all but the pair of them, their secret place. Just below another secret place. Magnus’ own.

His head breaks the surface of the cove. Beneath the fluke of his mertail, Jace sleeps. And before his eyes, in moonlight, Alexander bathes. The placid water lapping him in ways Magnus wishes he could still do to Alec himself.

Alec walks the barren shoreline. Its supple fingers stroke his ankles. He wades. Water glides up his thighs like hands. He immerses himself in the shallows. And the ocean welcomes. It welcomed Magnus too.

Starting with a graze across the back of his hand. Acquired while swimming in the cove. The flash of a tail he thought was only light. Or Alec playing sharks again.

But the punctures didn’t heal. In the warmth of Alec’s arms one day, Magnus woke cold and scaled. With nails behind nails, on hands and feet. Silver flecks gilding his inguine. And a yearning to return to the warmth of the cove.

“Don’t you ever feel,” he’d whisper on nights he’d beg Alec to take him back there, “Like walking out into it, just to know of what’s beneath what we can only see peaks of?”

“You yearn so much,” Alec would answer tearfully. “I don’t understand it. No doctor can explain it...I love you, Magnus. As much as before...but you’re not what they say you’ve become...you’re still so beautiful to me.”

How Magnus longed for those waves to glide up his shimmering thighs like Alec’s hands did. For his textured body to be taken inside the ocean, as Alec would take him inside himself.

Jace had understood that. Bringing Magnus seagrass and scallops to eat in the early hours. When Magnus was starving and his new tail was too sore to move.

And in the early days, Jace had seemed to know how his heart began to ache. And how lonely Magnus always grew. During the early nights.

Magnus wonders if Jace also knows of these early weeks. Now the physical and emotional pain has found a source of control. Does he know what it’s like to itch?

How these new scales do that to him terribly sometimes. Make him long to scratch at something dry. Draw blood from a beautiful something dry. Leave a tiny piece of himself inside it. And take a tiny piece of it away. Make it itch too. And crave.

Magnus dips beneath the waves and swims towards the shallows, craving Alexander again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thx for reading! A follow-up is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25643914) if you'd like to read some more.


End file.
